You can change your wife but you cannot change your mother and your football
club. [Common saying]

In the very funny How
to be a Carioca, Priscilla Ann Goslin described the soccer fan in Rio de
Janeiro: "Every carioca
has a favorite futebol team. If you are a real carioca, your
team will be either Flamengo, Botafogo, or Fluminense, and depending which one
you choose, you will be eternally referred to as a Flamenguista, Botaguense or
Tricolor, meaning respectively a Flamengo, Botafogo or Fluminense fan. You
will cherish your team second only to your mother and be more faithful to your
team than to your own spouse. Consequently, once you have chosen your team
you will despise the other two for as long as you live. If a team other
than yours is playing a team from São Paulo, for example, in the finals of a
national championship, you will simply ignore the entire event. Under all
circumstances, a true Carioca will only acknowledge the existence of his own
team."

The unresolved question from the above quotation is just how a
carioca
chooses a team. Is it purely random? Or are there social,
psychological, economic and/or political factors involved? Given the
central importance of the sport of football in Brazilian life, this is not a
frivolous musing. In Tony Mason's Passion
of the People? Football in South America, he wrote:

The word passion is never far away from any attempt to get
under the skin of football in South America. Passion means 'any
vehement, commanding or overpowering emotion of feeling.' To be
passionate about something is to be more than enthusiastic: it is to be
'ardently desirous' or zealously devoted.' There is no lack of evidence
to suggest a growing passion for football in South America, most clearly seen
in the great cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo. Football established itself in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay less
as a competition between cities, more on the basis of club rivalry within
cities. The city leagues were dominated by what the British call 'local
derbies' between a relatively small number of clubs; in Montevideo, Nacional
and Peñarol; in São Paulo, Corinthians Palestra Italia (Palmeiras), São
Paulo, Portuguesa; in Rio, Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo and Vasco da Gama;
in Buenos Aires, matches between the big five, Racing, Independiente, San
Lorenzo, Boca and River Plate ...

As a device in the quest for national identity; as an arena
'constructively' manipulated by politicians and generals; as an agent of
political, socio-economic, and cultural elites in order to stunt working-class
and popular consciousness and revolt; as a rare potential 'bottom-up' medium
of challenging dominant, hegemonic perceptions in order to create more
suitable psychological and cultural conditions for social change; and as a
bodily, psychic, and spiritual extension of the individual and community
senses ... the dominant orientation of Latin American football, especially at
the professional level, has been towards a nationalistic, authoritarian,
class-based, and gender-specific manipulation of the sport by political,
military, socio-economic, and even cultural elites.

In the early years of the century, many old-style
establishments - not only football clubs but also factory management boards
and the like-representatives of Latin America's elite, made attempts to form
relationships with working-class teams. At times this took the form of
patronage, with an established club funding an affiliated local team. At other
times, it took on other dimensions - managers encouraging the creation of
football sides among the workers to engender company loyalty and, perhaps more
importantly, to divert employees' attentions away from the more damaging
spectre of industrial unrest. In these early relationships formed between the
elite and the masses in football, can be seen the origins of one of the most
compelling arguments in the analysis of football in Latin America: that
football serves as an opiate of the masses, an instrument of mass control, a
social adhesive binding the most volatile and precarious of ethnic and
political mixes.

The clubs represented particular neighbourhoods and in some
cases represented and dramatized other social differences. Once River
Plate had moved their ground from Boca, for example, then the Boca-River
matches became confrontations between the rich and the poor. Similarly
in Rio, Fluminense was associated with the old, high-status families, Flamengo
the team of the poor and the blacks, Vasco da Gama supported by Portuguese
migrants and their Brazilian-born descendants while Botafogo attracted the
modern middle classes. In São Paulo, where the immigration was much
higher, Palmeiras is still run by Italians and their descendants and São
Paulo and Corinthians are the clubs of the middle and lower class
respectively. Of course these neat and tidy interpretations should not
be taken too far. Football clubs attract supporters for many reasons,
both rational and irrational. Fluminense clearly attracts some workers
who wanted to identify with a powerful club supported by the best families,
and over time success and the spectacle provided by outstanding players also
attracts.

... the initial phase of soccer in Brazil has been
characterized as a practice confined to the descendants of upper-class native
families and well-established foreigners, usually Englishmen. Social
discrimination against common and colored people pertained, so to speak, to
the order of things. Soccer was practiced in private clubs—first at
the São Paulo Athletic Club (1888), and subsequently at the Associação Atlética
Mackenzie College (1898), Sport Club Internacional (1899), Sport Club Germânia
(1899) and Club Atlético Paulistano (1900)—whose associates were recruited
exclusively from the ranks of high society.
Since Brazilian society officially ignored racial discrimination, colored
people were not necessarily banned from playing soccer. Rather, the initial
predominance of white players in Brazilian soccer stemmed from social
criteria. For this reason it is legitimate to speak of "social
whiteness," a phenomenon dictating that people, independent of their skin
color and thanks to their privileged socio-economic position, are well
received by society. As Mário Filho has pointed out: "If a player like
Joaquim Pedro, Paulistano left-winger (as the position was then known), a
black man, from the black branch of the Prado family, was transferred to Rio,
he would be very well received in an elite club like Fluminense. Joaquim Pedro
was a colored man but he belonged to a distinguished family; he was a rich man
and he frequented the best circles." As this example shows, skin
color was no hindrance if the player had a privileged socio-economic
position. More sophisticated, or perhaps more hypocritical than American
racial discrimination, Brazilian discrimination can be suspected or discovered
only if one notices that the great majority of Brazilian colored people
occupied (and continue to occupy) low-status jobs. "Colored people
prevail or stand out in jobs like those of shoe polisher, carrier, cleaning
personnel, night watchman, streetcar conductor, kitchen personnel, lower grade
railroad employees and similar activities, which are either badly paid or have
a low profile of social prestige."

But soon the white person's privilege began to dissolve in a
fortuitous and surprising way. In 1904, technicians and section directors of a
textile industry, Companhia Progresso Industrial do Brasil, founded The Bangu
Athletic Club. Whether the number of founders was not enough to compose two
teams, or, as is suggested by Rosenfeld, the directors of the plant knew that
"the English textile producers in Russia had promoted soccer among their
workers to stimulate their willingness to work and their esprit de
corps," the
truth is that Bangu became the first Brazilian soccer club to have
working-class players. Indeed colored players did not threaten the privilege
of white players: "The worker, white or black, who played with the
masters, did not either rise or climb down in the industry; he would stay
where he was."
The Bangu example opened a rift that in the short term would change the
history of Brazilian soccer. Even by its geographical location—the plant and
worker's village were built very far from the city of Rio and far away from
the private high-schools attended by wealthy students—The Bangu Athletic
Club stimulated the admittance of colored men to the sport. Although soccer
did not promise its players a profession, we can see from the Bangu example,
which was almost immediately followed by other worker's clubs (Andaraí,
Carioca), that it assured them lighter work and some privileges: "The
player-worker, on the day of training, would receive a ticket with which he
could leave the plant earlier without losing the day's pay." So the
closed clubs, whose associates belonged to the upper- and middle-classes, came
to lose their exclusivity in soccer, as clubs spread out along the plains (the
so-called campos de várzea), where the players manufactured the soccer-ball
itself. From then on the difference between the big and small clubs was
established. The former—in the Rio of that time, Fluminense, Botafogo, and
Flamengo—continued to have socially white players as athletes. The latter
comprised the clubs of the suburbs, formed in the north zone of Rio. During
the first decade of this century soccer was already becoming a popular sport
and received some good coverage in the newspapers. Its popularization,
however, did not threaten the great clubs. "Fluminense and Botafogo did
not find a menace in soccer's popularization. The most expensive seats were
separated from the terraces. Everything was separated. It was not enough to
play soccer to get into a club such as Fluminense or Botafogo. It was
necessary to belong to a good family."

... When soccer
overcame rowing in popularity, representation of an opposite ideal of the
athletic body threatened white supremacy, as embodied by the great clubs,
which made use of stricter measures to defend their privileges. The Liga
metropolitana, which then directed soccer in Rio, prescribed that players be
able to read and write, as well as to provide proof of employment in some
legal business. The second measure stemmed from clandestine professionalism:
to maintain colored and poor men as players, the clubs that tolerated them
offered their athletes modest benefits, such as help with transportation,
small sums of money for victories and, above all, fake jobs. From the point of
view of white players these benefits were either dispensable, or proudly
refused. However, the clubs that relied on poor athletes needed somehow to
provide for them. This explains the growth of a younger club in Rio: Vasco da
Gama. Without belonging to the circle of the great clubs, Vasco was founded
and supported by the Portuguese colony of Rio de Janeiro. Owners of the
majority of businesses at the beginning of the century, the Portuguese
registered the soccer players as fake employees in their grocery stores,
shops, and plants, releasing them for training at Vasco. The policy
adopted by Vasco da Gama was so successful that the club won the Rio
championship in the first year it competed. The following year, the Associação
metropolitana de esportes amadores (Metropolitan association of amateur
sports) was founded. One of its first measures was to exclude Vasco from the
championship under the claim that the club did not have its own stadium. Only
in 1926, thanks to the Portuguese colony, Vasco overcame the prohibition by
finishing the construction of its stadium. In the same year, however, another
small club, São Cristovão, became soccer champion of Rio.

Given these historical factors for the development of these
football clubs, the choice of a club may indeed be circumscribed to a large degree.
Here, we do well to recall Karl Marx's famous passage from The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men
make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make
it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations
weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be
occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did
not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they
anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from
them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in
world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."

Rio de Janeiro provides a setting in which to explore the
internal workings of soccer clubs and the role they play in symbolizing the
real divisions within the city: Rio's twelve soccer clubs help break down the
urban mass and integrate people into subgroups. Confrontations on the
playing fields reflect real-life antagonisms and jealousies between fan
groups. In Rio, as in other Brazilian cities, the strongest rivalry is
between social classes.

Rio's team of the masses is Flamengo; its symbol is a black
vulture. Loyalties fluctuate according to team standings, but roughly
one-third of Rio's population pledges allegiance to Flamengo, far more than to
any other team. It is said that more Umbanda rites are seen before
Flamengo games than are performed for any other team. Flamengo is the
most famous club in Brazil; requests for Flamengo shirts come from as far away
as the Indian regions of the Amazon. Often migrants adopt Flamengo as
their team when they arrive in Rio, because they have heard of it back home,
thereby further swelling its huge following among the urban poor.

Flamengo has 65,000 card-carrying members (exceeded only by
Corinthians in São Paulo with 150,000), but its fans number in the
millions. They are despised by rival fans for their overwhelming numbers
and boastfulness after victory and for the fervor with which they try to
recruit new fans. However, they are also respected for their fidelity to
the team and for their feeling of brotherhood toward other fans. Sayings
like "when you meet a Flamengo, you meet a friend" attest to their communal
spirit. Flamengo fans I spoke with claimed that, when they must choose,
they prefer to do business with someone who cheers for Flamengo. I saw a
beach vendor offer a discount to those who could show they were fans of
Flamengo on the morning of a big game, although I presumed he was motivated
more by commercial instincts than be sentiments of brotherhood. There is
a folklore that people believe, like the story of a rich man's being robbed of
all his possessions: finding a Flamengo membership card in the man's wallet,
the robber ,also Flamengo, returned everything.

Flamengo's greatest foe, Fluminense, thought of as the team
of the elite, has the second-largest following in the city. The team's
nickname is 'white powder,' referring to the powder used to lighten the faces
of aristocracy of an earlier era. Although both teams draw players from
the lower class, Flamengo players are expected to act rough and crude; a more
gentlemanly code is imposed on Fluminense players because of the heritage they
represent.

Fluminense's social pretensions are best reflected by the
fact that it is one of the few soccer clubs in the country that restricts its
social membership. More like an exclusive country club than a soccer
club, Fluminense rigorously screens applicants. The club's list of
ineligibles includes criminals, persons with contagious diseases, and the
handicapped, except for those who were maimed while fighting for their country
or while in the service of the Fluminense Club. Fluminense is so
restrictive that its own players, although worshipped on the field, are
treated as "employees" and are prohibited from attending most of its
activities.

Considered on of the most elaborate soccer membership clubs
in the world, Fluminense is one of the two Rio clubs to profit from its social
sector. White stucco buildings roofed with red tile, surrounded by lush
gardens, form a compound in one of the central districts of the city.
Fluminense has its own stadium that holds 25,000 people, massive gymnasium,
tennis courts that accommodate more than 2,000 spectators, three swimming
pools, steam baths, rifle range, and beautiful club buildings that house the administrative
offices, library, trophy galleries, bar, restaurant and ballroom.

Vasco da Gama represents the city's huge community of
Portuguese immigrants and their Brazilian-born descendants. The team was
well known in Portugal, so immigrants joined upon arrival. The club's
ready-made community eased their entry by providing contacts for those who
came alone and a place to socialize for those with extended family and friends
already in Rio. Vasco is now one of Brazil's richest soccer clubs.
The $20 million the club claims in assets has come mostly as gifts, in the
form of city properties, from wealthy members of the Portuguese
community. It has more than 2,000 "owner-members"
(proprietários) holding titles worth $2,5000 each.

Vasco has 60,000 general members and the third largest
following in Rio. It has fielded so many great winning teams that even
those not of Portuguese descent have declared themselves Vasco fans. The
Carnival celebration at Vasco's club grounds attracted 150,000 members and
friends. Every Saturday night 5,000 teenagers come for their
"Hi-Fi" dances. More than 2,000 watch players train before a
Flamengo vs. Vasco match. In addition to the professional players,
approximately 700 amateur athletes wear the Vasco da Gama uniform.

The Botafogo Club was started by college students in the
affluent Botafogo district of Rio and attracted wealth and politically
powerful patrons who built a strong club based on modern management
techniques. Botafogo has retained its appeal to the young, the urbane,
the politicos, and the nouveau riche. Botafogo has supplied more than
its share of World Cup players, so it attracts young fans from all over Brazil
who attach themselves to the national heroes they see on television.
Large clubs like Vasco, Flamengo, Fluminense, and Botafogo each have about 250
employees who care for the grounds, arrange the festivities, service the
teams, and do the necessary clerical and bookkeeping work for the professional
soccer, amateur soccer, and social membership sectors.

We will now cite some survey data from the TGI Brasil
study. In Rio de Janeiro, a total of 1,280 persons between the ages of 12
to 64 years old were interviewed during 2002. Within this sample, 45.3%
said they were Flamengo fans, 20.9% were for Vasco da Gama, 10.6% for
Fluminense and 7.7% for Botafogo. In the next chart, we show the
incidences separately by the three socio-economic levels that is commonly used
in Brazil. Indeed, the patterns are quite consistent with Lever's
presentation.

(source: TGI Brasil)

Within the same TGI Brasil survey, a total of 1,792
São Paulo residents between the ages of 12 to 64 years old were
interviewed. Among these respondents, 34.8% said that they were fans of
Corinthians, 18.1% for São Paulo and 14.6% for Palmeiras. In the next
chart, we show the incidences by socio-economic status. Here is the story
of a Brazilian-Amerian remembering his father, who was a loyal Corinthian fan.

(source: TGI Brasil)

It is not always the case that the political economy acts as
the base which affects the superstructure which encompasses socio-cultural
matters such as football club affiliation. In fact, it is possible for the
superstructure to modify the base. The best known counterexample is
Sócrates, the Brazilian national team captain of the 1980's who led a
democratic movement within the São Paulo-based Corinthians club. The
story of the democratic Corinthians is recounted in Alex Bellos' Futebol:
Soccer, The Brazilian Way:

Sócrates started his career at Botafogo, the local team in
Riberão Preto. In 1978 he transferred to Corinthians, in São
Paulo. After a few years he started to tire of the way he and the
players were treated by the management. Players were never consulted on
decisions. It was an authoritarian atmosphere that paralleled the
political situation of the country.

So, Sócrates --- together with his team-mate Wladimir ---
rose up against the club hierarchy. They organised their footballing
colleagues into a utopian socialist cell, called Corinthians Democracy, which
took control of all the decisions that would affect them. 'We decided
everything by consensus,' says Sócrates. 'It was simple things, like
"What time will we have lunch?" We would suggest, say, three
options and we would vote on it. And the majority decision was
accepted. Problems hardly existed. there are only problems if
there are confrontations of opinion. And there weren't any.
Everything was voted on.'

But it was not just 'simple things'. Corinthians
Democracy voted to print 'vote on the fifteenth' on the backs of their shirts
in the run-up to elections on 15 November 1982. The elections --- for
federal deputies, senators, governors and mayors --- were one of the first
steps towards ending the dictatorship.

Sócrates' comrades also challenged the 'concentração',
which is part of Brazilian footballing culture that is perhaps the greatest
affront to players' liberties. The word means 'concentração' in the
military sense, of 'bringing together troops'. It is usual for Brazilian
clubs to insist that before every match --- no matter how important --- the
team must sleep in a hotel, often for several days at a time. The
reasoning behind it is that players are now grown-up enough to look after
themselves and must be supervised. 'Footballers are not mature enough to
behave themselves before games without anyone supervising them,' argues the
national coach Luiz Felipe Scolari. 'It's been proved that sex before a
game isn't bad for you. But, for our players, they don't do things by
halves. At home they behave more normally. Away from home, with
their other sexual partners, they want to prove that they are the best lovers
in the world. So they go carousing and tire themselves more, to the
point that their performance on the pitch is affected.' The
concentração may be paternalistic, he says, but it is for the players' own
good.

'It took us six months to change the rules about the
concentração,' explains Sócrates. 'This was the trickiest one.
There was a certain fear, which remains until today --- that without the
concentração some players feel exposed. But, ideologically speaking,
concentração exists to lower a person's status. It's like: "You
aren't worth anything. You are irresponsible. You need to be a
prisoner." It's stupid. The better someone is feeling, the
better he will play. It's obvious. And where do you feel better
than in your own home?'

He smiles sincerely when he remembers the battles that were
won. In 1982, Corinthians won the São Paulo state championship with
'Democracia' printed on their shirts.

'Perhaps it was the most perfect moment I ever lived.
And I'm sure it was for 95 percent of the others too.'

In Corinthians, and Questions of Democracy and Citizenship
(in Joseph Arbena (ed) (1988) Sport
and Society in Latin America : Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass
Culture), Matthew Shirts quotes Sócrates: "I'm struggling for
freedom, for respect for human beings, for ample and unrestricted discussions,
for a professional democratization of unforeseen limits, and all of this as a
soccer player preserving the ludic, joyous, and pleasurable nature of this
activity." Of course, that is not just about football. This is
what most people want too, and it is really not a lot to ask ...